Winners, Losers, Beggars, Choosers

Album: Party Girls/Broken Poets (1984)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Winners, Losers, Beggars, Choosers" is one of Elliott Murphy's most visually evocative songs. In a Songfacts interview with Murphy, he explained that he can't remember precisely what he was thinking of when he wrote a lot of his old songs, but he suspects he was talking mostly about himself.

    "I saw it as a film," Murphy said, "a divorced musician and high-priced call girl, maybe, trying to escape their worlds and ending up in Venice."

    While definitely being cinematic, the song bounces around a lot in telling its story. It's somewhat more of an impressionistic tale rather than a linear narrative.

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